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One of the Hutton Inquiry’s little surprises concerns the relationship between the Labour government and the top ranks of the British intelligence community. They are in love.
Downing Street’s Director of Communications, Alastair Campbell, regards John Scarlett, once our top spy in Moscow and now chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as “a mate”. Tony Blair is immensely grateful for the help the intelligence services gave in the preparation of the dossier on the threat posed by Iraq. At the urging of an unnamed spymaster, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) empties its files trying to find a few nuggets to help make the dossier even stronger.
All parties concerned have nothing but flattering comments to make about each other. Mr. Scarlett says there were “no rows” with Mr. Campbell or anyone else. Mr. Campbell passes on the Prime Minister’s congratulations on the dossier--“a very good job”. Mr. Scarlett insists that there was no unease in the intelligence community about political pressure influencing the contents of the dossier. It is all sweetness and light--except for Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, who was apparently often kept in the dark.
What’s going on? Historically, the Labour Party and SIS have hated each other. The very nature of intelligence and security work makes most officers natural conservatives and wary of the Labour Party which, especially during the Cold War, they saw as soft on Communism. Two Labour Prime Ministers--Ramsay MacDonald and Harold Wilson--felt that the secret services had too much power, confronted them, and came off second best.
MacDonald, leader of Britain’s first Labour government, alarmed the intelligence services by telling them that if he won the election in 1924 he would consider suspending them and opening their files.
Four days before the election, the intelligence services produced the Zinoviev letter. It purported to be from the president of the Communist International ordering British party members to prepare for the revolution by using their sympathisers in the Labour Party. The letter was a forgery but Labour lost the election.
Moving closer to today, there was the case of a group of rogue intelligence officers and the Wilson government. At the height of the Cold War, a group of MI5 and SIS officers believed that their services had been penetrated by the KGB. When Roger Hollis, chief of MI5, refused to allow them to investigate their fellow officers, they decided that he too, must be working for the Russians.
It is a telling example of the power of individual intelligence officers that this rogue group was then able to then set about investigating their own boss. They devoted years to compiling a secret dossier on him and even after he had retired, managed to persuade his successor to allow them to conduct an official investigation.
No proof emerged and the investigating team was disbanded. But the rogue officers felt that the services were covering up to avoid a scandal, so one of them, Stephen de Mowbray of SIS, approached Number 10 Downing Street and sought an interview with Wilson. Wilson was stunned when he learned of the case against Hollis and arranged for Lord Trend, former Secretary of the Cabinet, to carry out yet another inquiry. It, too, found that there had been no cover-up and no evidence that Hollis had been a Soviet agent.
The rogue officers did not like this and when damaging rumours about the Wilson government--especially that Wilson himself and some of his circle had communist links--began to spread in Whitehall, Wilson decided that the rogue officers might be out to get him. Certainly some of them believed that Wilson was, if not a Soviet agent, then certainly a Soviet asset.
The rogue officers tried to put together a case against Wilson and some of his colleagues. Both Wilson and his Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, the highest legal officer in Britain, believed that they were under surveillance. Lord Gardiner said later, “I thought it more than likely that MI5 was bugging the telephones in my office.”
In August 1975 Wilson summoned the director of SIS, then Maurice Oldfield, and the head of MI5, then Michael Hanley, and asked them point blank if they were trying to bring down his government. Both replied that they were not. They admitted that there were officers who were strongly anti-Labour but both directors assured him that the services would remain under ministerial control regardless of which political party was in power.
Wilson did not believe them. He asked his publisher, Lord Weidenfeld, to undertake a mission for him. He gave Weidenfeld a letter to carry to Washington and hand to Senator Hubert Humphrey, a friend of Wilson’s. The letter named a number of MI5 and SIS officers Wilson believed might be plotting against the Labour government.
He wanted Humphrey to ask George Bush, then director of the CIA and future President of the United States, whether the CIA knew anything about these officers. Was it possible, for instance, that these British officers might be working secretly for the CIA. Bush took Wilson’s letter so seriously that he himself flew to London to assure Wilson that if he had indeed been under surveillance, then it was not the CIA which had been responsible.
Given this poisoned history, the really interesting question provoked by the Hutton Inquiry would be: how did Tony Blair win over British intelligence? How did he incorporate such traditional enemies of Labour into Blairism. A bigger budget, more officers, and more power are obvious answers. But there has to be more to it than that.
Spy bosses realised Blairism was so different from the soocialism of old Labour that it could be trusted to defend the realm as strongly as the Conservatives had. For its part, can it possibly be that the Blair government was seduced by the illusory glamour that the secret world holds for the uninitiated?
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